Sabeer Bhatia was instrumental in creating the innovative Hotmail in the 90s. Prior to that, emails were thick client programs that had to be installed on a PC. Accessing Internet itself was seen as a wave and modern. It is interesting to understand the intellect and vision behind Sabeer's idea of web-based email. The idea itself was revolutionary and forward looking which paved way to modern web-based emails including G-Mail.
Today we talk about SAAS, PAAS and cloud computing at ease because the economy of IT industry and reducing cost of hardware and internet bandwidth is making this possible. Sabeer did not have all these luxuries in those days. He probably had to run http, email and storage servers on extremely costly hardware which he might have provisioned from his funding agencies. And scalability and performance would have been a major challenge to him although I can understand that the Internet traffic was not as high as what you see today. He probably could not sustain the exploding Internet traffic and his data centers were probably unable to scale till Microsoft took over Hotmail and was able to revitalize it using high-end data centers. That gave hotmail a new life. Had it been today, Sabeer would have used cloud computing footprint to run Hotmail and probably would not have been depending on large organizations.
Whatever be the case, Hotmail would have been extremely efficient in resource management and data processing. We must salute this gentleman for his innovation, visionary thought, candid judgement and entrepreneurship. Being a fellow Indian, I would like the Indian Government to recognize his work and felicitate him. This would nourish and motivate innovation in our country and the IT world.
